Blood Flow Arterial Network Simulation with the Implicit Parallelism Library SkelGIS

Abstract

Implicit parallelism computing is an active research domain of computer science. Most implicit parallelism solutions to solve partial differential equations, and scientific simulations, are based on the specificity of numerical methods, where the user has to call specific functions which embed parallelism. This paper presents the implicit parallel library SkelGIS which allows the user to freely write its numerical method in a sequential programming style in C++. This library relies on four concepts which are applied, in this paper, to the specific case of network simulations. SkelGIS is evaluated on a blood flow simulation in arterial networks. Benchmarks are first performed to compare the performance and the coding difficulty of two implementations of the simulation, one using SkelGIS, and one using OpenMP. Finally, the scalability of the SkelGIS implementation, on a cluster, is studied up to 1024 cores.